• Half the world — nearly three billion people — live on less than two dollars a day.
• The GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of the poorest 48 nations (i.e. a quarter of the world’s countries) is less than the wealth of the world’s three richest people combined.
• Nearly a billion people entered the 21st century unable to read a book or sign their names.
• Less than one per cent of what the world spent every year on weapons was needed to put every child into school by the year 2000 and yet it didn’t happen.
• 1 billion children live in poverty (1 in 2 children in the world). 640 million live without adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to safe water, 270 million have no access to health services. 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (or roughly 29,000 children per day).

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"I always felt a pervasive sadness," Brad Pitt tells me. "I'm not sure I earned it, because it was always there. It existed in the place where I grew up—in my family, in people who have true sweetness and true goodness. Maybe it's a congenital sadness that everyone has to some degree."

Brad Pitt, 43, one of the world's most recognized stars, says his life and beliefs are informed by this sense of existential sadness. It is what drives him as a man and an actor. It is also what makes him want to fix the world.

"Maybe an offshoot of it is the discomfort I feel when other people are unhappy and wanting," he suggests. "When I see someone without basic health and education, without a supportive family, I feel a connection. That's what moves me the most. I could be him, if I'd been born on some other dot on the map."

Brad Pitt and I recently spent some time together in Toronto. What is most impressive about him is not his good looks and movie-star glamour, things he has in spades. Rather, it is his openness and empathy with people who are hurt. There is much of the generous, unspoiled American boy in his character, a kind of innocence. He truly believes he can help mend broken lives and change the world. And that, he says, makes everything else he does meaningful.

"Whoever said all men are born equal never left his own backyard," Pitt asserts. "I see people everywhere without opportunity. I want to help level the playing field."

Pitt grew up in Springfield, Mo., the oldest of three children in a conservative, Southern Baptist family. His mother was a school counselor; his father ran a trucking company.

"My dad made sure our needs were met," he says. "I had a very loving family." When he speaks of his childhood, his voice softens with the accent of his youth.

"I always had a lot of questions about the world, even in kindergarten. A big question to me was fairness. If I'd grown up in some other religion, would I get the same shot at Heaven as a Christian has? My mom would come into my room and talk to me. I was very fortunate to have that dialogue with her, but in high school I started to realize that I felt differently from others."

Brad went to Springfield's Kickapoo High, excelling at school debates and sports. As he got older, his religious doubts increased.

"I had crises of faith," he says. "I thought you had to experience things if you want to know right from wrong. I'd go to Christian revivals and be moved by the Holy Spirit, and I'd go to rock concerts and feel the same fervor. Then I'd be told, 'That's the Devil's music! Don't partake in that!' I wanted to experience things religion said not to experience."

By the time he entered college, Pitt had scuttled his fundamentalist beliefs. "When I got untethered from the comfort of religion, it wasn't a loss of faith for me, it was a discovery of self," he says. "I had faith that I'm capable enough to handle any situation. There's peace in understanding that I have only one life, here and now, and I'm responsible."

Pitt's causes range from rebuilding New Orleans to AIDS care in Africa. Last year, among the millions of dollars he and his companion of two years, Angelina Jolie, donated to charity, $1 million was given to Doctors Without Borders, another million to Global Action for Children.

"It's not just altruism," he insists. "It's not a payback. Philanthropy is good for us. It's in our own best interest. It's personally rewarding when you see lives change because of an action you take that, though simple for you, means so much to others. You sleep peacefully at night."

I ask if his charitable work is the result of his relationship with Miss Jolie.

"That's idiotic!" he replies. "I do it because I'm a member of the human race. In Africa you see people on the street dying from AIDS, children left without parents. We're all cells of one body, with the same emotions and desires for our families—for a little dignity and a chance for a better life. Let's focus on that! I believe in the founding principles of America. I want to fight for that. I know most Americans feel the same way."

I suggest that he run for political office.

"Oh, my God!" Pitt says in surprise. "I never thought about it. I have no desire at this point. Maybe I serve better by not going through that door." He laughs. "George should do it!" he says, offering up pal Clooney. "He'd be quite good. I think Ben Affleck should run."

Brad Pitt was in Toronto for the film festival's screening of his new movie, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. He stars as the outlaw James, one of America's first murdered celebrities. It is a magnificent performance that's likely to win him an Oscar nomination.

Pitt's journey to stardom began in 1986, two weeks before graduation from the University of Missouri, when he suddenly dropped out and headed to Los Angeles.

"I had this sinking feeling as graduation approached," he says. "I saw my friends getting jobs. I wasn't ready to settle down. I loved films. They were a portal into different worlds for me, and Missouri wasn't where movies were made. Then it hit me: If they didn't come to me, I'd go to them."

In L.A., he took acting classes and worked at odd jobs. Within nine months, he began to land small parts on TV and in teen flicks. In 1991 he had a small role as Geena Davis' boy-toy pickup in Thelma & Louise. It made him famous. Everything followed from there.

"When fame really hit me was when Legends of the Fall was released three years later," he says. "You get no warning about what celebrity is or how to deal with it. It's sort of multitiered. The initial stage is feeling discombobulated and not up to the task. I didn't understand the incessant attention when I went outside, the way people completely focused on me. It made me very uncomfortable.

"Then you start to see the fickleness of celebrity," he continues, "that it isn't rooted in something of real value. There is this strange wanting by people to get next to you. It has nothing to do with you but with something they feel they are missing in themselves."

Brad Pitt's fame increased exponentially after Interview With the Vampire, Troy and the three Ocean's caper films. His outsized celebrity also was powered by his romances with actresses Juliette Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow, his very public marriage to and divorce from Jennifer Aniston, and his current relationship with Jolie, 32.

"I understand the tabloid machine," he says. "There's money to be made off of Angie and me, but it has gotten so out-of-hand. There's no decency, even when it comes to our kids."

Jolie and Pitt have three adopted children—Zahara, 2, Pax, 3, and Maddox, 6--and a birth daughter, Shiloh, 16 months.

"I mean, yesterday Angie was taking Maddie off to school," he continues angrily. "There were 30 paparazzi outside. One guy sticks a video camera in Mad's face, yelling, 'Maddox! Maddox!' He doesn't get a response. He doesn't know my boy. Mad is already savvy to this, unfortunately. But my 2-year-old dreads being anyplace there are cameras. It scares her. They're all in her face. My kids are faced with this every day! It's disgusting. So we've been run out of L.A., all the major cities. We just can't live there. You don't understand—this is the hunt, the hunt, the hunt! I thought it might be over a year ago. It's gotten worse."

He pauses, shaking his head. For a moment, I glimpse world-weariness in his blue eyes, affecting and sad.

"What's important to me is that I've defined my beliefs and lived according to them and not betrayed them," he says. "One of those is my belief in family. I still have faith in that."

The world can point to a number of victories already. Smallpox is gone, of course, and polio nearly so. Thanks to the leadership of the Carter Center, we've virtually eliminated guinea-worm disease, an excruciatingly painful parasite that is ingested with tainted water. There are new treatments available for visceral leishmaniasis, also called black fever, which is second only to malaria as the world's deadliest parasitic killer.

Millions of lives have been saved through better financing and delivery of the medical advances available today. The GAVI Alliance has immunized 100 million children, averting some 600,000 deaths last year alone, and a creative approach to the bond markets has raised $1 billion more to buy more vaccines. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is saving 3,000 lives a day. That clinic we visited in Durban was made possible by an American program: PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Those lifesaving drugs, the salaries for the staff—even the prefab building—were all financed with American tax dollars.

Some lifesaving solutions can be extremely simple—iodized salt to prevent stunted growth, for example, or oral rehydration solutions to fight diarrhea. Consider that one of the easiest ways to cut down on infant mortality is to keep babies warm and dry. Earlier this year, Save the Children recruited knitters through the Internet to knit and crochet 280,000 caps for infants.

The fight against malaria—which kills a million people a year, mostly children—illustrates how radical thinking can be applied to both discovery and delivery of new interventions. Scientists at Columbia University are trying to block a mosquito's sense of smell so it can't find humans to bite. Others at Virginia Polytechnic Institute are developing pesticides that activate only inside a mosquito, posing no danger to humans or other animals. At the same time, I'm amazed by the work of the Nothing But Nets campaign, which has managed through Web-based marketing to raise $13 million—mostly from young people—for insecticide-treated bed nets.

Tuesday 18 September 2007

A military watchdog organization filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday against the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and a US Army major, on behalf of an Army soldier stationed in Iraq. The suit charges the Pentagon with widespread constitutional violations by allegedly trying to force the soldier to embrace evangelical Christianity and then retaliating against him when he refused.

The complaint, filed in US District Court in Kansas City, by the nonprofit Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), on behalf of Jeremy Hall, an Army specialist currently on active duty in Speicher, Iraq, alleges that Hall's First Amendment rights were violated beginning last Thanksgiving when, because of his atheist beliefs, he declined to participate in a Christian prayer ceremony commemorating the holiday.

"Immediately after plaintiff made it known he would decline to join hands and pray, he was confronted, in the presence of other military personnel, by the senior ranking ... staff sergeant who asked plaintiff why he did not want to pray, whereupon plaintiff explained because he is an atheist," says the lawsuit, a copy of which was provided to Truthout. "The staff sergeant asked plaintiff what an atheist is and plaintiff responded it meant that he (plaintiff) did not believe in God. This response caused the staff sergeant to tell plaintiff that he would have to sit elsewhere for the Thanksgiving dinner. Nonetheless, plaintiff sat at the table in silence and finished his meal."

Moreover, the complaint alleges that on August 7, when Hall received permission by an Army chaplain to organize a meeting of other soldiers who shared his atheist beliefs, his supervisor, Army Major Paul Welborne, broke up the gathering and threatened to retaliate against the soldier by charging him with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The complaint also alleges that Welborne vowed to block Hall's reenlistment in the Army if the atheist group continued to meet - a violation of Hall's First Amendment rights under the Constitution. Welborne is named as a defendant in the lawsuit.

"During the course of the meeting, defendant Welborne confronted the attendees, disrupted the meeting and interfered with plaintiff Hall's and the other attendees' rights to discuss topics of their interests," the lawsuit alleges.

The complaint charges that Hall, who is based at Fort Riley, Kansas, has been forced to "submit to a religious test as a qualification to his post as a soldier in the United States Army," a violation of Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation said Defense Secretary Robert Gates is named as a defendant in the lawsuit because he has allowed the military to engage in "a pattern and practice of constitutionally impermissible promotions of religious beliefs within the Department of Defense and the United States military."

The lawsuit seeks an injunction against Welborne from further engaging in behavior "that has the effect of establishing compulsory religious practices" and asks that Gates prevent Welborne from interfering with Hall's free speech rights.

Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an organization that seeks to enforce the law mandating the separation between church and state in the US military, said the lawsuit would be the first of many his group intends to file against the Pentagon.

"This landmark federal litigation is just the first of a galaxy of new lawsuits that will be expeditiously filed against the Pentagon in a concentrated effort to preserve the precious religious liberties guaranteed by our beautiful United States Constitution," Weinstein said Monday. "Today, we are boldly stabbing back against an unconstitutional heart of darkness, a contagion of fundamentalist religious supremacy and triumphalism noxiously dominating the command and control of the technologically most lethal organization ever created by humankind: our honorable and noble United States armed forces."

A Pentagon spokesman said he could not comment on the lawsuit because he has not yet seen it.

Weinstein, a former White House attorney under Ronald Reagan, general counsel H. Ross Perot and an Air Force Judge Advocate (JAG), has been waging a one-man war against the Department of Defense for its blatant disregard of the Constitution. He published a book on his fight: "With God on Our Side: One Man's War Against an Evangelical Coup in America's Military." Weinstein is also an Air Force veteran and a graduate of the Air Force Academy. Three generations of his family have attended US military academies.

Since he launched his watchdog organization nearly two years ago months ago, Weinstein said he has been contacted by more than 5,000 active duty and retired soldiers, many of whom served or serve in Iraq, who told Weinstein that they were pressured by their commanding officers to convert to Christianity.

The lawsuit also includes examples of other alleged constitutional abuses by Pentagon officials.

Last month, the Pentagon's Inspector General responded to a complaint filed last year by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation alleging that Defense Department officials violated military regulations by appearing in a video promoting a fundamental Christian organization.

The Inspector General agreed and issued a 47-page report that was highly critical of senior Army and Air Force personnel for participating in the video while in uniform and on active duty.

The report recommended that Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack Catton, Army Brig. Gen. Bob Caslen, Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, Maj. Gen. Peter Sutton, and a colonel and lieutenant colonel whose names were redacted in the inspector general's report, "improperly endorsed and participated with a non-Federal entity while in uniform" and the men should be disciplined for misconduct. Caslen was formerly the deputy director for political-military affairs for the war on terrorism, directorate for strategic plans and policy, joint staff. He now oversees the 4,200 cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point. Caslen told DOD investigators he agreed to appear in the video upon learning other senior Pentagon officials had been interviewed for the promotional video.

The inspector general's report recommended the "Secretary of the Air Force and the Chief of Staff of the Army take appropriate corrective action with respect to the military officers concerned."

The Army generals who appeared in the video appeared to be speaking on behalf of the military, but they did not obtain prior permission to appear in the video. They defended their actions, according to the inspector general's report, saying the "Christian Embassy had become a 'quasi-Federal entity,' since the DOD had endorsed the organization to General Officers for over 25 years."

In just a few weeks thousands of atheist, agnostic, humanist, and secular students will descend on campuses everywhere. Waiting to greet them will be dorm monitors, professors, friends new and old, and all kinds of clubs: the Campus Crusade for Christ, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Agape, New Life, Newman Catholic Center, Hillel ....

Wait a minute. Wouldn't you like to see some secular student groups included in the mix? Of course -- and that's where the Secular Student Alliance comes in. We exist for one reason: to help secular students find other secular students. And we're good at it: last year our base of sustainable campus groups expanded from 60 to 80, and we hired a regional organizer in southern California. But we're a long way from giving every secular student a campus community, and we need your help. Every bit of our work is funded by atheists, agnostics, humanists, and other freethinkers who care about secular youth. We are an independent, democratic organization which would not exist except for the generosity and loyalty of our many friends in the freethought movement.

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